A catch-all, catch-up post
There are 1,126 posts filed in Checking In (this is page 15 of 113).
It was five years ago today that my close friend Gerry Reid was killed in a freak traffic accident. The days that followed were some of the darkest days of my life, though obviously they don’t even come close to what his family went through.
The scars heal but the wound never goes away. I miss Gerry’s wisdom and humor. Someday we will hoist tasty brews again, my friend. Cheers to you, wherever you are.
Kelly and I had a rare night alone last night, having shuffled Hallie off to a friend’s party and Travis off to a sleepover. We settled in on the couch to watch a movie, keeping an eye on the clock on the mantle so we could pick Hallie up from her party in time.
As the clock advanced to our 9:30 departure time, we increased the frequency of checking it, of course. I looked at it at 9:15, turned again to the TV, then checked the time again a few minutes later. It seemed that time was passing more slowly than I had expected but I thought little of it.
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We’ve just gone through a string of 8 snow days over the past two weeks. The first storm was ice and sleet of about 1-2 inches. The second was a powdery snowfall that surprised everyone Monday morning and kept us hunkered down most of the week. Just when the dust cleared by Wednesday and the temperatures finally warmed up enough to allow some semblance of normalcy we got hit with another storm. When the flakes began falling Wednesday night, forecasters predicted anywhere from 2-8 inches possible, with some predictions of epic levels of snow. The blizzard predictions were largely a bust here in East Raleigh as warm air created a wet, slushy snow that started melting quickly. The end result was a week’s worth of school (and lost work productivity for the grown-ups), and a few scattered power outages in the neighborhood. I was so happy today to brave the roads and sit at my office desk again!
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VA diagnosis by crystal ball
After years of mysterious health issues, I finally got mad enough two weeks ago to file paperwork to enroll in VA coverage. A day or two after mailing my paperwork I was delighted to receive a phone call from a VA representative who helpfully set me up with an appointment. Having long worked in customer service, I was impressed with my representative’s knowledge of his job and his rapport with his customer. In fact, I was already working on a blog post and even considered sharing my praise with Rep. David Price. All was looking up until I got this fancy-looking, full-color customized booklet in the mail yesterday. On page five was the bad news:
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I’ve been getting up to speed on Amazon Web Services over the past few weeks. With the end of the year bonus I got from my work I put down the money to get a 3-year reserved instance, gaining a hefty hosted server for a remarkably low price.
I’d had an Amazon instance for a few months just to kick the tires. However, when my reserved instance got purchased, it took me a while to figure out that Amazon had changed its virtualization techniques and in order to take advantage of the new instance I would have to convert my existing image to a completely new one. The blocker for this was that the CentOS-based AMI I used seemed locked and the root drive couldn’t be mounted to a new instance. I had to copy everything using the old instance.
My new instance was created completely by me, using a recipe that helped me build it from the ground up. Now that I have a good base to start from I can build some useful AMIs and share them with others. I hope to make a Rivendell Radio Automation AMI someday so that people can launch their own online radio station with a few clicks of a button.
I’ve also dug into the wonder that is S3, creating an s3fs “filesystem” on my Linux instance for serving up music for my Rivendell install. I will eventually do the same for the media included here on MT.net and push that to CloudFront.
The cool thing about the cloud is that it’s a geek’s ultimate laboratory. It’s incredibly easy and cheap to spin up computer sessions. I can play with technologies without having to commit to them long-term. I’m having a lot of fun with it.
I’m particularly proud that I was able to migrate the server that hosts my neighborhood email lists from a locally-hosted server over to AWS without any of my neighbors knowing I’d done it. I guess twenty years of sysadmin experience pays off every now and then!
Google Fiber is coming to the Triangle
Feeling like the limo driver in the Bud Light “Dr. Galakawicz” commercials, I answered “yeaaassss, I would” and smoothly hung it around my neck.
Inside, I hung out with the media pros and snapped photos with wild abandon. I’ve collected the shots into my Google Plus album. Check them out!
Google Fiber is coming to Raleigh
I hope to attend the upcoming meetings to learn more about this service, after having fought a long battle to bring truly high-speed Internet to the state. I have no special inside track on the goings on, though, so I’ll likely learn about it like everyone else: through the media. It would’ve been great to receive an invitation, though, but in the bigger picture I’m just glad that a cause I’ve supported for many years will finally become reality.
The Goog and The Gov will hold a 1 PM press conference today to announce the news.
I was saddened to hear local WTVD anchor Larry Stogner has ALS, also known as Lou Gherig’s Disease. He has been the face and voice of the Raleigh-Durham area for decades and to see him doing battle with this devastating disease is heartbreaking.
I’ve been thinking of my own recent health issues. For a while it seemed that the twitching that popped up last summer had subsided but recently it has come back just as strong as before. I can’t sit at my desk during the day without feeling some muscle somewhere just twitching away. I had to reschedule my follow-up visit with a neurologist due to a PTA conflict but I see him again next week. I hope we can figure this out.
2001 Honda CR-V EX
Been pretty busy around Chez Turner. First off, right around Christmas I caught some sort of cold which sapped much of my energy for a few days. Then my stuffy nose kept me from sleeping well for several nights. But that wasn’t enough to keep me from trying to do way too much as is my habit.
The changing calendar brought about the urge to knock out plenty of tasks that have been nagging us for a while. We cleaned out our attic of a ton of unneeded stuff. Then we did the same to the garage. Then we did the same to the utility room. Then we painted our dining room (after, what, six years?). Then we shifted our living room furniture around. Then we hung pictures on the wall (after, what, six years?). Oh, and I put in a charging station for our electric car.
In-between, we found time to go ice skating with our friends, go on a run or two, host our kids’ friends for playdates, go see the excellent movie The Imitation Game, and even get in some music practice. I’ve also spent some time building a spreadsheet to decipher our Time of Use – Demand (TOUD) electricity rate from Duke Energy Progress. I fixed up our CR-V to sell (Armor-All, car wax, engine cleaning, photography, create an ad) and used a smartphone app and a $15 OBD2 adapter to get the car like new. I also toyed with my new RTL-SDR tuners I bought from China, capable of tuning from about 50 MHz to 2200 MHz. And somewhere in there I made time to cook a very tasty meal tonight, after I watched the second half of the N.C. State win over Duke.
Life sure is busy but it’s also good.
